Mountain Lingo

The days are few and far between when you can find a real mountaineer who’ll tell you that the fellow you’re looking for lives “a whoop and a holler away.” If he says, “two creeks and a cuss fight up the road,” what he’s really saying is that the man lives a little beyond the second creek.

Both expressions indicate a “right smart piece.” If the way happens to be not quite that far, then you might be told that the man you’re seeking lives “jest a hop and a jump up the road.”

The old-time vernacular was colorful and often amusing, but it was usually understandable, inasmuch as it had a rhythm, a flow and an eloquence of its own. It carried a reflection of Elizabethan English sprinkled with Scotch and Irish, and a lot of phrases conjured up in the mind of the speaker.

When two mountain men approached the point in an argument that further words seemed futile, one might say, “If you feel froggy, jump!” If the other didn’t jump, he might be considered a coward, and that was even worse than being “churched,” which, meant dismissal from the congregation, usually for an overabundance of sinning.

Often the other would jump and land on the fellow “like a shower of rain.” Then his friends could confide in others that one of the combatants “up and give the other feller a good whuppin’.” Far be it for the man who administered the licking to boast of it himself.

These weren’t hillbillies talking; they were mountaineers, rough as a cob and ready to cloud up instantly against anyone who called them “hillbillies.”

Few are left who speak and fully understand the quaint speech of the old-time Southern highlander. You might occasionally hear someone who lives pretty far up the creek lapse into that vernacular. You’d have to go “a far piece” from any town to find one, though.

In the old days, they would say such things as “the fur side of the mountain,” meaning the other side, or they might call it the “yander side,” or, shorter and simpler still, the “yan side.”

To the old mountaineer, narrow was “narrer,” a wheelbarrow was a “wheelbar,” marrow was “marrer,” might became “mought,” and meadow, widow, window, and shadow became “medder, widder, winder, and shadder.”

Call it carelessness with English if you wish, but it was a universal language that all other mountain folks understood. It was the city slicker who dropped out of the conversation somewhere nearer A than Z.

If you had a wagon stuck in the mud, you might ask a passerby to “hope me git my waggin out,” and the other would know exactly what you meant. 

Any mountaineer who “thought a sight of you” really liked you, but if he said you were a “varmit,” you’d better look out! Varmit covered anything or anyone you didn’t like, whether it be on two legs or four.

“Right smart” was not only a gauge of distance; it was a degree of anything you wished it to be. For instance, if a woman said she was “right smart tard” you could bet she was tired enough to drop. When she said she was “right smart techy” she was so touchy it might be best to leave her alone, else they could say the next day that she “fit you like a wildcat.”

Some idioms of the old-time mountaineer are still alive and well in today’s English. You know exactly what a fellow means when he tells you that somebody “ain’t got a lick a sense.”

“Here ’bouts” means near. “He lives here ’bouts.”

“Farr and squarr” was an admirable trait of mountain folk in that they more often than not settled their differences in fair and square combat, and would fight “at the drop of a hat.”

Someone who had eaten his fill might refuse more food by simply saying “I can’t come it.” And if he wanted to pay the cook the highest compliment, he would say, “This eats right where you hold it.”

Poor, fair, good, and excellent were seldom used by the uplander to explain the state of his health, but if he told you he was “feelin’ porely,” he was darn near dead. When he said he was “middlin,’” he was feeling fair. If he said he felt “tolerable,” he was feeling good, but if he said he was “feelin’ like two cats in a tow sack,” he couldn’t feel any better.

Once I heard an old mountain man, who had to plow a mule through most of his growing-up years, say that he “was raised right in behind a mule’s tail.”

If a man and his wife wanted a couple to come and visit with them, the wife would say, “You’uns come,” and if she wanted the others to bring their family, she would pluralize the invitation by saying, “You’unses come.”

“Atwist” and “betwixt” were often used, but I have never deciphered the difference — if there is one. “Hit” was the mountain word for “it.” “Hit ain’t like him to get lost in the woods.”

A drunk was “lit up like a Christmas tree.”

No one bought a box of salt; it was always a “poke o’ salt.”

Corn bread, a staple of the old-time mountaineer, was “corn pone.”

A young woman who had suddenly matured in the right places might provoke a comment like, “A woman shore gets growed up all of a sudden.” 

Mountain folks would say “sparkin’” for courting, “air” for are, and sometimes “air” for “there,” as in “That ’air man’s  a-goin’ someplace someday.” A sparrow became a “sparrer,” and one who received pleasure from something might say he got his “enjoys” from it, or he was “pleasured” by it.

Asked a question about something he was said to have done, a forgetful man might answer, “That ’air might have happened, but I ain’t got no recollection of it.”

No one in the hills asked where you went to school. They asked “where you got your larnin’?” Indeed, a lot of words were coined because of a lack of schooling. A fellow might be talking and come upon a word he wasn’t sure of. Then he’d  make up his own version, say it, and go right on. “Satisfactionate,” for example. “That’s satisfactionate with me if hit air with you.”

One who “saw the elephant and heered the owl” had been through tough times of his own choosing. A man who had really survived a visitation to the school of hard knocks was one who had “been up the creek and over the hill.” He who had been skinned in a crooked card game or conned in any other manner, especially with a fruit jar of “corn squeezin’s” handy had “seed the varmit.”

Southern highlanders were fiercely independent. They tended their own affairs, minded their own business, asked for help only when they absolutely had their “back agin’ the wall,” and expected others to do the same. Their possessions were their own, and they expected others to leave them alone, as they would others.

Some rode on mules.

Mountaineers were in the habit of associating a familiar animal with something they wanted to describe. Thus came the following phrases: “ain’t seen you in a coon’s age,” “your chickens come home to roost,” “pretty as a speckled pup,” “happy as a flea on a dog’s back,” “sly as a fox,” “quicker than two shakes of a lamb’s trail,” “jittery as a young mule in a tin stall,” “madder than a wet hen,” “lonesome as a bear in a holler log,” and “thicker than hair on a squirrel’s tail.”

“Beholden” and “hain’t” were a pair of words that received wide usage. As a thank you, mountain folks would say, “I’m beholden to you,” and as a statement of fact, “I hain’t beholden to nobody.”

“Reckon” meant “believe” and could be used to ask a question. “Reckon it’s gonna rain today” was an assertion that could be turned into a question  simply by adding a questioning tone: “Reckon it’s gonna rain today?”

Expressions of those with slight book learning were usually incorporated in things they knew well from everyday life. How far a man could spit was often used as a measurement, as in “I’d say hit’s about two spits wide.” However, if you were in the process of trading, that saying required a familiarity with the distance the other man could spit. 

“Hain’t much a feller can say ’bout that” was an expression for “I don’t know.”

Similar characteristics in two people were noted with the expression that they had been “tarred with the same brush.”

“A sight” could mean “a lot,” as in “a sight of people was there.”

“Fetch” was commonly used: “Fetch me a bucket of water.” Some who lived a little farther back in the sticks said “fotch,” as in “Fotch me some wood fer the farr.”

Many years ago, I was told of a mountaineer who lived about 20 yards from his mailbox beside the road. To avoid mud on rainy days, he had constructed a pathway of sand, four or five inches deep, stamped down to a fairly solid texture and held in place by sideboards sunk edgewise on both sides of the path from doorstep to mailbox.

A neighbor came to see him one day, noticed some mail in the box and took the mail to the house, thinking the old mountaineer would be pleased. Instead, the neighbor  was greeted with a tirade. The fellow went to his kitchen and returned with a sifter and a shotgun. He gave the sifter to the neighbor and told him to sift all the sand from doorstep to mailbox, threatening bodily harm if he didn’t.

“Sift ’er good,” said the old man. “Don’t miss airy bit. Hain’t no tellin’ how much mail you went and lost betwixt the box and the house, and if you did lose some, we’ve shore got to find it.”

The poor fellow needed a while to sift all that sand and stomp it back down, and when he had finished the task, finding no lost mail, the old mountaineer put down his shotgun and said, “Let this be a lesson to you. Don’t you never go near my mailbox again.”

Then he added in a friendlier tone, “Now, let’s go down to the barn and have a little snort.”

Mountain folks walked tall, spoke their minds with the truth as they saw it, protected their own, and above all else were truly the most independent “old cusses” the world ever knew.